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Some days ago I was reading about the overclocking capabilities of the new Core i7 CPU which, with some new parameters to be set in BIOS, and paying some attention to the integrated memory controller which appears to block some overclokers with their overvolting intentions. Well, it appears that this is not anymore an issue. Especially with the “budget” CPUs (if you can ever call a 300€/320$ CPU a “budget CPU”…) of the 920 Series, which was overclocked by some review website enthusiasts up by 42%, almost pairing in performance the bigger, and almost 4 times more expensive, brother Core i7 965 Extreme Edition, which in turn was only able to achieve 4GHz starting from 3.2GHz, which equals to a mere 25% of overclock. Not too bad, you might say.

But the counterpart in this overclocking war, and all time opponent AMD, with it’s last revision of CPUs was able to beat that, and by a fair margin, too. My dear friend Theo over at his blog (Theo’s Bright Side Of IT) has posted an interesting news about AMD’s internal overclocking team (I didn’t even know they had one, btw), which was able to achieve the whopping overclocking record of 6GHz on it’s Phenom II core, obviously with extreme cooling provided by dry ice.

AMD is back on the battlefield of the overclocking war, Theo says, and due to his “insider” contacts in both CPU manufacturing companies, I do believe that we are going to see a lot of overclocking battles from now on. A sort of deja vu, in fact: it reminds me of when I overclocked a Celeron 400MHz @ 650MHz, and a friend of mine, with an AMD 600MHz, achieved 800MHz. with tap water and an aluminum waterblock. That was the beginning of my overclocking carreer, and liquid cooling passion. But that’s another story…

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One Response to “AMD vs INTEL: clash of the titans on the overclocking battlefield”

1. Theo Valich says:

   November 21, 2008 at 1:19 pm

   Hi George… well, I definitely agree with you on that. It is not common to see a CPU company openly supporting overclocking and putting overclocking results during their own Analyst Day, when financial boys and girls meet up and almost regularly fail to understand how will a technology earn money or not.

   It is always good to have competition, and this time around, AMD has the slight advantage over i7. Costs of i7 are enormous (CPU+Cooler+DDR3+motherboard), while almost all AM2 and AM2+ motherboards will be happy to play the role as host for these 45nm CPUs.

   Competition is good, and we will see in what direction will that go. But for the first time since July 14, 2006 – we have a competition going on.